Category: value

Preserving Ambiguity

Published March 20, 2009 by cgerrish

rene-magritte-castle_roots

“Design is preserving ambiguity.” This fragment recently surfaced and won’t leave my current playlist. It was a thought expressed by Larry Leifer in a talk called “Dancing with Ambiguity, Design Thinking in Practice and Theory. ” Today it finally collided with a blog post on StopDesign.com. Douglas Bowman is leaving Google, where he was employed as a visual designer. He summed up his reason thusly: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Our human interactions with the Network swim in a sea of data. Each stroke of a key or click of a mouse leaves a trace somewhere. The business of analyzing these traces to plot the trajectory of our activity streams powers the internet economy. And while past performance is no guarantee of future results, it’s apparently close enough.

This begs the question that was asked of Mr. Bowman. If design and ambiguity are intimately intertwined, can ambiguity be preserved through the sword of data? In this particular skirmish, the answer appears to be no.

Ambiguity is the enemy of economics in the Network’s current equation. The ratio of clarity to ambiguity must always be advancing in favor of clarity. Value is equated with unimpeded visibility, its end goal a kind of panopticon. What then of poor ‘ambiguity?’ — linked in this context to the opposite of value. In the grips of such an economy, why should ambiguity be preserved?

If design has value, then ambiguity must have value. What, then, is the nature of the value of ambiguity? A thing that is ambiguous may have more than one meaning, and may have many meanings. Proponents of logic would have us push ambiguity in the direction of nonsense.

But we can also move in the direction of the dream and poetical thinking. The design object is overdetermined, overflowing with meaning. It connects with the emotions of each individual and the diverse set of circumstances that are linked to those emotions. Imagine a graph linking the design object to the emotions of each person and then the circumstances that provided the ground for those emotions.

Clarity produces value in a restricted economy, in a controlled vocabulary. Ambiguity produces value in a general economy, in a language open to play. Just as with clarity, not all ambiguity is created equally. The poet’s pen, the designer’s pencil, the painter’s brush make the clear mark that overflows with meaning.

Of course these thoughts have been batted back and forth over the tennis net for years upon years. Ambiguity continually undervalued, the underdog, beaten at every turn, it continues to limp along. Although, never fully disposed of, for to get to where you’ve never been, there is no clear road. To see what you’ve never seen requires a different kind of vision.

From T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets:

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

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UX: The Pleasure of the Text

Published March 10, 2009 by cgerrish

rolandbarthes

Working backwards, we start with Roland Barthes’ slim volume: The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes turns the phrase around, upside down, inside out; opens the dimensions of the words across several languages; and views it through the lens of dozens of thinkers and poets. The pleasure of the text and the text of pleasure.

If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer’s complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee– guarantee me, the writer– my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.

Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of the Text

There’s the pleasure of the text itself, which is Barthes’ subject, and then there’s the pleasure of the activity of reading the text. The text has lead a cozy existence, tucked away in a folio as ink on paper. Its reading required only a clean, well-lighted place and a sufficiently comfortable chair. Requirements not lost on the large book retailers.

As the text lifts anchor and departs from its safe harbor of ink and paper, it will visit many ports before it finds an acceptable new reading environment. The fact that one can read text from a computer screen or a mobile phone does not mean that it’s a pleasurable experience.

In the act of reading, we often become so absorbed by the narrative that we lose sight of the mechanism by which the words enter the stream of our consciousness. It’s that flow, that lift off that the user experience of reading must enable.

But let’s take a step back. What happens when a reading experience falls short? Rather than each word pulling you toward the next, the reader must exert energy to pull herself from the current word to the next one. If the value of the text is high enough, the energy expended is offset, and a surplus of value remains. If the cost is too high; no reading takes place. There are many use cases where this kind of investment transaction provides value. Over time an investment in a complex transaction type leads to a higher skill level and better yield.

When reading for pleasure, we want the cost be very low, almost non-existent. And that gets us to the user experience of reading the digital text. Digital text has been available for many years, but the “all in” cost of reading has been too high. We’ve seen similar value equations with listening to MP3 files and using the Network through a mobile phone. The pieces were all there, but the user experience wasn’t right.

reading_a_book

When will we know that the user experience of digital reading has found the right ratio? We’ll know when there is no experience of the activity of reading, but only the pleasure of the text.

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e-Books: Intertextuality, Boundaries and Doorways

Published March 7, 2009 by cgerrish

There was a shift in momentum, the reading we do on web pages and the reading we do with printed books joined together in the Kindle and the iPhone. The movement was from perceiving the situation as ‘either/or’ to one of ‘both/and.’ The question about one thing replacing another suddenly seemed less important. Another point of access was opened, another door.

Consider the following sequence:

This library contains one-of-a-kind handwritten manuscripts
This library contains manuscripts and copies of manuscripts, both produced by hand
This library contains manuscripts, copies of manuscripts and printed books
This library contains printed books and audio/visual media encoded in celluloid, vinyl, recording tape and CD/DVD
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials and a connection to the Network to view web pages
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials and a connection to the Network to view web pages and digitized audio/visual/textual materials.
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials, a connection to the Network and loans out eReading devices that can contain and connect to any digitized media.
This library contains nothing. It makes digital media available to its members via the Network through a variety of reading, viewing and listening devices

A library moves from a building that contains things to a service that enables connection to things.

Note: this change in the distribution network also reveals the converging business models of for-profit and non-profit journalism. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Now consider this eReading use case:

I’m reading a hardcover printed novel in my favorite chair. I get to a stopping point and mark my place with a bookmark, and I use my iPhone’s camera to send a bookmark to the Network. Later, I pick up my eReader, find my place and continue reading. I’ve got to go meet a friend so I mark my place and then drive over to a cafe. In the car, I turn on the streaming audio version of my book. It’s remembered my place, and picks right up with the story. I arrive at the cafe, mark my place and then go in and sit down. My friend is late, so I pull out my iPhone, find my place and continue reading. My friend arrives, I mark my place and start talking to my friend about this facinating novel.

We have the sense that the book is the container that holds the words. The library sequence above tells us something about the changing technology of the containers and the contained. As the book itself breaks free of a specific container and allows us to interact across multiple access points, all we ask is that the particular sequence of words be preserved and that our current place be available when we need it.

If the book isn’t its container, but rather a fixed stream of words that can be accessed through a variety of devices, are we fundamentally changing our idea of the book? When we buy a “book” are we buying access to the stream of words via a particular set of methods?

homer

This way of talking about books as a stream of words brings to mind an older form, the tradition of oral storytelling. Homer, if there was such a person as Homer, sang the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey to an audience of listeners. A significant difference: in the oral tradition, variation in the word sequence is part of the value proposition. In modern books it would simply be considered an error.

As textual media moves toward a digital stream the boundries between and among books become more ambiguous. We’ve become used to the idea that search functions are available for individual digital books. As the community of digital books grows, we will also have search among books. Search will be unbounded to play in the intertextuality of all books. We may be traveling across the connections between books just as today we traverse the hyperlinks of the web. But the linkages aren’t just matching bits of text here and there. They aren’t just words, they mean something.

norman_o_brown

The idea of all books becoming one book– and of books becoming intimate, brings to mind the work of Norman O. Brown. Specifically the preface to Closing Time:

Time, gentleman, please?
The question is addressed to Giamattista Vico and James Joyce.
Vico, New Science; with Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
“Two books get on top of each other and become sexual.”
John Cage told me that this is geometrically impossible.
But let us try it.
The book of Doublends Jined.
At least we can try to stuff Finnegans Wake into Vico’s New Science.
One world burrowing on another.
To make a farce.
What a mnice old mness it all mnakes!
Confusion, source of renewal, says Ezra Pound.
Or as James Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake:
First mull a mugfull of mud, son.
As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (HOMO INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (HOMO NON INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA).

As Brown reminds us, books have never been separated, their containers are a kind of illusion, encoding only an instance of a song. The dark territory between texts is murky, and we may need to mull a mugfull of mud before we find anything of value. And value can be found both in ambiguity and in clarity.

Joyce was known for writing down a stream of consciousness and printing it out as something that resembled a novel. It’s a river that runs through all of us. And in Joyce, the streams of books, and the streams of consciousness are joined as when the child was a child…

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

Peter Handke
Song of Childhood

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Google: All Your Books Are Belong To Us

Published February 2, 2009 by cgerrish

Reading Google & The Future of Books by Robert Darnton

My Sunday morning reading started off in one direction and veered suddenly in another. I had been thinking about the position Jason Calacanis put forward on yesterday’s GillmorGang broadcast. Calacanis has recently been lamenting what he believes is the death of blogging. He sees a “race to the bottom” where writers will do anything for ratings. Rather than write a blog, he’s returned to the era of epistolary exchange and combined that with the mailing list. In the limited economy of that form, he finds more of the kind of value he’s looking for.

It’s at that point that I started reading Robert Darnton’s essay ‘Google & the Future of Books‘ in the latest New York Review of Books. Darton begins his essay with a look back at the Enlightenment:

The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.

This free flowing economy of thoughts, ideas and conversations was perhaps a Utopian ideal from the beginning:

Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor’s approbation, printed in full in their text.

You can easily trace the lineage, the geneology of the idea, from the Republic of Letters to Vannever Bush’s Memex, Ted Nelson and Xanadu, Doug Engelbart and Augmentation, and Tim Berners-Lee and the original World Wide Web.

This is where Darnton hijacked my stream of thought. My desire to explore the political economy of restricted and general systems of epistolary conversation was shoved aside as Darnton revealed his purpose in the essay. He enlightened me to the fact that Google has monopoly ownership of the right digitize our nation’s books. And this of course means that all access will have to go through Google.

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

Darnton mourns the lost opportunity to create a National Digital Library. As Google search is increasingly the provider of our first hyperlink to click as we enter the World Wide Web; now they will have absolute power over access to all books under copyright. In this Google moves from Soft Power to Hard Power. We choose to use Google’s search engine because it works well for us. If we want to search the nation’s digital library, our Republic of Letters, we will have no choice but to ask Google. Darnton believes it’s too late to change the outcome. I hope he’s wrong.

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